Market Economists Beyond the West: The Agents of Peripheral Liberalism, 1970–2020(Routledge Studies in the History of Economics)

This book offers a survey of ideas and practices of economic liberalism beyond Western Europe and North America. It traces the intellectual development and political agency of pro-market economists in Eastern Europe, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and West Africa, from the 1970s onwards. Drawing on original primary-source research from five continents, the contributors to this volume – both internationally recognised senior scholars and emerging historians and social scientists – bring deep regional and linguistic expertise to their analyses. Each chapter critically examines the transformation of planned and state-centric economies into deregulated market systems, exploring these transitions from the perspective of the economists who drove the reforms. By challenging Western-centric narratives of neoliberal policy advice, this book offers fresh insights into the chronology, circulation of ideas, and power dynamics that shaped one of the late twentieth century’s major transformations. Offering a new approach to the study of liberal ideas outside the West, the book will be of interest to not only academics cutting across disciplinary boundaries, including historians of (the marketisation of) state socialism, but also area specialists on Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Global South.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Beyond Diffusionism: On the Agents of (Neo-)Liberalism in the (Semi-)Peripheries of the World Economy I. The circulation of market thought in Soviet-style economies 1. The Resilience of Liberal Economic Ideas and Their Contributions to Vietnam’s Market Reform in the 1980s 2. From Marxist to Market Democrat. Su Shaozhi and the Eastern European Roots of Chinese Peripheral Liberalism 3. Workers Into Partners. Market Socialist Experiments in Soviet Estonia and Their Links to Hungarian and Chinese Reforms, 1975–1988 II. From market socialism to market liberalism in Eastern Europe 4. Towards a ‘Real Functioning Market’. Czechoslovakia between Socialism and Capitalism 5. Negotiating the Future of State Socialism. Liberals and Their Contenders in Hungary, 1980-1987 6. Between Self-Management and Authoritarianism. Polish Paths to Neoliberalism 7. Critiques of Neoliberalism vs. Analyses of Postcommunism. The Transformation of Eastern Europe in the 1990s III. The revival of market liberalism in the Global South 8. Intellectual Origins of Market Reform Before Nigeria’s Neoliberal Turn 9. ‘Neoliberalismo Criollo’. The Many Faces of the Chilean Model 10. Latin American Business Elites. Intellectual Masterminds of Peripheral Neoliberalism 11. Between Shock and Utopia. Peru's Neoliberals Beyond the Washington Consensus 12. ‘Every Nation and Its Modernity’: Economics and Society in Arab Liberal Thought

About the Author :
Tobias Rupprecht is a historian at Freie Universität Berlin and Universität zu Köln, focusing on the global history of socialism, post-socialism, and liberalism. His scholarship often connects Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. Key publications include 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe, 2019 (co-authored with James Mark, Bogdan Iacob, and Ljubica Spaskovska), and Soviet Internationalism after Stalin. Interaction and Exchange between the Soviet Union and Latin America during the Cold War, 2015.